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More bad news for poor Johnny Bolton (and Bush) - the senate foreign relations cmte is expanding the investigation into this sick bastard.

His “serial abuse,” ideology, and horrible haircut aside, I find one good reason NOT to promote this guy (I am assuming that being named UN Ambassador is a “promotion”): reforming our OWN intelligence service! After the whole WMD debacle, its pretty clear to everyone that there were some serious problems going on and a lot of group-think and political pressure. This guy has not only played a part in exagerrating the WMD threat, but he tried, on several occasions, to get people fired who didn’t agree with him. Talk about some serious “political pressure” - is that any way to run an intelligence agency? What kind of message does that send to actually promote him? And promote him to the UN of all places????

George Jr. and his buddies made a seriously bad mistake in nominating this joker.

The House passed a bill yesterday that would make it illegal to dodge parental-consent laws by taking minors across state lines for abortions, the latest effort to chip away at abortion rights after Republican gains in the November elections.

The mainstream media often wonder why they are perceived as biased. Phrases like the one I emphasized above are one reason.

[Edited to add: Oh by the way, I think the law in question is a pile of Republican dung. But that’s for another post.]

Even a cursory glance at the grades makes one thing clear: the Lincoln Neighborhood Alliance is biased toward more liberal candidates. That isn’t at all surprising. The political scene in Lincoln has for several years been painted as a battle between “business” and “neighborhoods,” with “business” acting as a proxy for Republicans and “neighborhoods” for Democrats. It’s a false dichotomy, of course, but it remains a popular division.

If I get more time I’ll try to fill out the survey on my own. I glanced at it, but I haven’t had time yet to actually write in my responses.

LES wants to raise rates by an impressive 9%. That’s a pretty hefty rate increase, if you ask me. LES has rightfully accumulated a nice stash of customer satisfaction capital over the years due to its excellent customer service and low rates. I wonder how much of that capital will be wiped out by this announcement.

I’m a big mass transit fan and I use StarTran buses to get to work most days. I ride the bus for a lot of reasons, one of which is that I once calculated it is about 1,500% more expensive for me to drive to work than to take the bus. But time is one of the biggest reasons not to use StarTran. StarTran is one of the most pathetic excuses for a mass transit system in the country for a city of Lincoln’s size and demographics. It is an incredibly inefficient system, which is one of the reasons why so few people use it. It takes me 40 minutes to get home using the bus (including walking time), compared to 15-20 minutes in my car (including walking time to the parking garage).

And don’t get me started on all the time lost because you can’t run errands on the way to and from work.

No, little fourth grade student from a Lincoln elementary school, saving time is most certainly not a good reason to ride the bus. But two out of three ain’t bad.

C-Span, the only TV channel that matters anymore for news, again replayed the Senate Foreign Relations Cmte meeting of last week this morning. I caught parts of it last week but had an opportunity to watch the whole thing today, including Dodd, Biden and Kerry go ballistic over John Bolton. A synopsis of all the Bolton allegations from an anti-Bolton perspective can be found here and here. To recap, Bolton has alleged problems about exagerating WMD claims, overstepping bureaucratic lines to get people fired who disagreed with him, patterns of “serial abuse” (most recent allegation here), and overall credibility problems - debate over his ideology notwithstanding.

Republican Senator Voinovich made a lot of headlines for voicing his initial opposition to Bolton during the meeting, which would deadlock the nomination 9-9. Since then Voinovich has been been the focus of a lot of hate mail recently, for example see Malkin’s latest take on it.

Where will Nebraska’s favorite politician weigh in on the nomination? During the meeting, the Chuckster said that he wanted to move the nomination out of committee but that he wasn’t necessarily going to vote for Bolton on the senate floor and that the allegations “demanded” further review. In fact, the Chuckster is being targeted by liberal groups to vote against Bolton and has yet again opted to depart from the party line and voice concern over Bolton.

Even the good are eventually overcome by evil. The latest victim: Google. Their crime: Google is trying to shut down Froogles because the name is similar to Google’s service, Froogle. Too bad Froogles was first—by two years.

Here’s a matter few people besides me actually care about: I’m thinking about converting Lincolnite.com to a different content management system (CMS). Currently I use Expression Engine (EE) by pMachine. It’s a commercial product, and it is relatively powerful. Best of all, the support is great. But progress toward new versions has been slow, and EE is missing a few features I would like to see.

Enter Xaraya. I started playing around with Xaraya because my employer may use it as a CMS for its websites. Xaraya is incredibly powerful, very extensible, and totally customizable. The more I play around with Xaraya, the more amazed I become. And it’s free.

The downside is there is a huge learning curve. I still don’t have a clue how Xaraya’s templating scheme works. I have printed off and read about 100 pages of documentation, and I’m only just beginning to apply that information to test pages for what could become a new—and much improved—Lincolnite.com.

Anyway, I’m probably just talking to myself here. If anybody has any thoughts, let me know.